PyReach
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@somasatori said in PyReach:
@somasatori said in PyReach:
The one I hear the most is Changeling Kiths and Seemings no longer being attached to one another.
sidebar obvs but, why? from my (admittedly fairly limited) experience with Changeling it seems like most peeps in MU-land were basically doing that anyway, just with a kind of pricey Merit that existed in the first edition?
Your guess is as good as mine! I think the detached system tends to simulate the Make-Your-Own-Dark-Faerie-Tale emulator that Changeling is trying to do, but I’ve personally never gotten an answer beyond “I don’t like it”
Ohh, man, do I have opinions on why I preferred the first edition of C:tL and the disconnect of Seemings and Kiths is one of them, though for a very particular reason. The update allows you to mix and match your Seeming (broad theme) with your Kith (pointed narrative), but doesn’t allow you to mix Kiths. This was incredibly frustrating for me when making my last PC because it was billed as “more flexibility”, but didn’t actually allow me to mechanically do the thing I would’ve preferred where none of the Seemings seemed to fit quite right but multiple Kiths did. It felt like settling on something I had to take but being locked out of something I wanted, with no obvious reason as to why this should be an issue if their goal was for me to be able to custom make my own dark fairy tale. You can fully customize your character! Except… not the way you actually want to. Sorry!
I also really disliked what they did with the Pledge system. In the previous edition, Pledges had to be mechanically balanced. This didn’t always make them fair, mind you. It’s is Changeling after all, and fairies are jerks. But it did make the rules for them, from an OOC standpoint, consistent and clear. The new version of Pledges seems to operate on a sliding scale of “much more open-ended depending on Pledge type”, with the examples of consequences given both very broad in scope and fairly limited in how many were presented. This is particularly true for Bargains, which have almost no mechanics attached to them whatsoever. That flexibility is great for TT but terrible for a MU* where, as noted elsethread, players hate to lose and are likely to react poorly to suffering consequences that can have such broad interpretations of what counts as fair. In the first edition systems, and frankly even in the oWoD Pledge system, which had a limited list of what Oaths you could swear, the consequences for breaking it were obvious and clear. “If you do this, you get X benefit but if you do this, you face Y consequence” is harder to argue with when that’s explicitly what someone signed up for, right here on the dotted line of their request.
Finally, and this is less about mechanics, I hate how the book is laid out. It drops you right into Seemings and Kiths without explaining the society that they’re living in. You might think that’s because they wanted to get all the CGen stuff lumped together first, since players reference that so often, but nope! The CGen chapter is then the THIRD chapter in the book, with the theme and society information sandwiched in between. But wait, wait! The explanation of Attributes and Skills is then listed in the FOURTH chapter, along with… combat mechanics, Pledges, and Tokens. If you’ve been playing WoD/CoD for twenty-some odd years and know what you’re looking for, this is a mildly irritating inconvenience. If you’ve never played these games before and know nothing about how this works? You’re getting a slew of character creation mechanics thrown at your face with zero context, get the context in the next section of the book, and now need to flip back and forth between three different chapters to actually make a character. I… what? No. No, that’s just bad design and I want to give their editor a stern look and a solid, “I’m not mad. I’m just disappointed.”
I will note that there’s also a lot of really good things about the 2nd edition that I thoroughly enjoyed, as well as few other, nitpicky things I didn’t like. But those are top three things that I found actively difficult to deal with in game play as opposed to being a minor quirk or hiccup, like all systems have.
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While I vastly prefer 2nd Edition Lost in 90% of everything…the complaints about pledges are absolutely valid.
There’s some good things: bargains with mortals are better in that they serve a specific purpose that mechanically explains HOW they hide you from the Gentry and how that can be useful.
Likewise, Seasonal bargains are better (but badly organized - it is a badly organized book overall, with a lot of weird things hidden throughout).
But I really miss being able to strike mechanically detailed pledges with other characters outside of the few defined bits in the core book. YES, the pledge mechanics were overly complicated and desperately needed some streamlining, but they threw the baby out with the bathwater.
